ActionScript 3.0 :: Shapes Drawn Dynamically Treated Differently

I was just conducting a little experiment, basically trying to come up with a stage resizing handler that would position everything on the stage with its x and y proportionate to its original position. That's when I discovered a very interesting thing.

Shapes that you draw using flash's drawing tools are treated completely differently than dynamically drawn shapes. Basically shapes you draw on the stage in the authoring tool would seem to have no x and y of their own, and also no matter how many different shapes you draw, to the compiler it's all one "child" object because it's all just one big shape.

To illustrate this difference, I created two separate files, but they both (seemingly) do essentially the same thing. In the first file, I drew a red circle shape dynamically with code, and set its x and y with code:

ActionScript Code:
var circle:Shape = new Shape();
var g:Graphics = circle.graphics;
g.beginFill(0xFF0000);

[code]...

In a second file, I manually drew a similar red circle shape, made it 100 pixels wide and tall, and positioned it at 100, 100 using the properties panel. This time, I took away the code that creates the circle dynamically and just kept the for loop:

ActionScript Code:
for(var i:int = 0; i < this.numChildren; i++) {
var item:DisplayObject = this.getChildAt(i) as DisplayObject;
trace(item);   //[object Shape]
trace(item.x); //0
trace(item.y); //0
}

In this second example, no matter how many and what kinds of shapes you draw, there will only ever be one display child and the x and y is always 0,0.

I for one kind of wish there were more of a one-to-one correspondence between the Flash IDE and the code window. Like, if we can create Shapes and name them dynamically, why can't we create Shapes and name them at authoring time? Or why isn't this now the role of the good ol' Graphics symbol? It's kind of like Flash and Actionscript have outgrown the authoring environment.

This would seem to have the effect of further widening the gap between design and development. Just thought I'd throw all this out there and see what kind of comments I get.